The audio channel at lynda.com is making a lot of noise at the NAMM show this year. NAMM (short for National Association of Music Merchants) is a massive conference and convention for all music-related products and services. In other words, it’s a giant toy store for musicians!

From January 19-22 lynda.com will be on-site at NAMM unveiling our expanded audio course offerings, meeting new audio folks, connecting with industry leaders, and checking out all the new gear.

If you’re at the show, please come by our booth (#4711) to say hi. If you can’t make it, check out this short demo of what the lynda.com audio team has been up to:

After the NAMM show, we’ll also be doing several twitterviews (interviews on twitter) with two of our audio authors, Brian Lee White and Bobby Owsinski. We’ll discuss key trends, the coolest news from NAMM 2012, and we’ll answer any questions you might have about NAMM, music technology, or the business in general.

Follow us on twitter @lyndadotcom, and join in on the conversation at these times:

Simply tweet your questions or comments to @brianleewhite, @bobbyowsinski, or @lyndadotcom with the hash tag #NAMMchat on 1/24 and 1/25.

*Editor’s Note: On January 11th and January 20th the lynda.com blog mistakenly reported the #NAMMchat dates as January 23 and January 24. The dates of the #NAMMchat will be January 24 and January 25, both at 12:30pm PST as mentioned above. Associates will be standing by to assist any audio lovers who may tune in on January 23rd. Please pardon our error!

Anyone who has worked with audio in any capacity has likely seen a graphic depicting a waveform. These waveform graphics display the amplitude expressed across time, but do you really know how those waveforms are generated and why we express them the way we do?

It’s all about pressure and how sound moves through a medium, like air. Changes in air pressure are picked up by our ears, and our brains translate those pressure changes into sound information.

Brian Lee White explains how air is compressed and rarefied to create waveforms in his Foundations of Audio: EQ and Filters course. Check out his explanation in the video here, and then dive further into learning about using EQ and filters to improve the sound of your waveforms…I mean, music.

For more on how to properly apply equalization (EQ) to improve the overall sound of your mixes, watch the full Foundations of Audio: EQ and Filters course in the Online Training Library®.

NAMM stands for the National Association of Music Merchants, and its purpose is to promote the benefits of making music by strengthening the music product industry. Every January, they put on a huge trade show in Anaheim, California, where companies large and small come together and show off their music-related products and services. NAMM is a musician’s paradise, really, with displays of every instrument you can imagine, and all the latest technology and gadgetry available to create music. If you’re headed to NAMM this year, make sure to carpe diem with our three tips for getting the most out of NAMM, and be sure to stop by and say hello to the lynda.com staff who will be at the trade show from January 19 through January 22 with demos of expanded audio training content on display.

Three ways to get the most out of NAMM

1. Expand your view

One of the main purposes of NAMM is to present what’s new in the audio industry. Nowhere else can you hold the products in your hands, ask questions to their creators, make contacts at the companies, and even potentially get great show-only discounts. As you walk the floor, you’ll expand your view of what you can do in the music industry…and you may even run into a few rock stars along your path.

2. Check out the H.O.T. Zone

The NAMM trade show is mainly known for its gear and instrument booths, however they’ve slowly over the past few years been building out the H.O.T. Zone. Short for Hands-On Training, the H.O.T. Zone is a mini-educational conference by itself, with excellent speakers, panel discussions, and clinics on extremely pertinent topics in the music industry. Check out a session or two at NAMM and learn something you can apply immediately to your musical career from industry experts.

3. Join Us for #NAMMchat Q&A on Twitter

If you can’t make it out to Anaheim, join audio experts and lynda.com authors Bobby Owsinski and Brian Lee White for a no-hype debrief on the key trends, important information, and announcements coming out of NAMM. They’ll be available live on Twitter to answer your questions about NAMM, music technology, and the business in general.

The Twitterviews will be held at these times:

January 24 from 12:30-1:30 PST: Brian Lee White @brianleewhite

January 25 from 12:30-1:30 PST: Bobby Owsinski @bobbyowsinski

Simply tweet your questions or comments to @brianleewhite, @bobbyowsinski, or @lyndadotcom with the hashtag #NAMMchat on 1/24 and 1/25.

*Editor’s Note: On January 11th and January 20th the lynda.com blog mistakenly reported the #NAMMchat dates as January 23 and January 24. The dates of the #NAMMchat will be January 24 and January 25, both at 12:30pm PST as mentioned above. Associates will be standing by to assist any audio lovers who may tune in on January 23rd. Please pardon our error!

Now that Logic Pro is for sale in Apple’s App Store (and for a much lower price than it was previously), there’s been a rush on users purchasing Logic and upgrading to Logic from GarageBand.

While both GarageBand and Logic have always offered access to the standard Apple Loops library as well as additional Jam Packs, with Logic Pro 9 users also get the added benefit of creating their own Apple Loops, complete with descriptors and search tags that make any hand-made Apple Loop completely searchable in Logic’s Loop Browser.

If you’re a new Logic Pro user, or are considering upgrading from GarageBand, check out Scott Hirsch’s Logic Pro 9 Essential Trainingto learn more about recording, editing, and mixing music with Logic Pro.

Compression is a tricky effect to master when mixing and mastering. Sometimes compression is meant not to be heard; that is, to be transparent. Other times, it’s certainly meant to be heard as it’s used to push a signal into harmonic distortion.

Recording with compression is an even more delicate art: Where a heavy hand can ruin an amazing recording, a light touch can control and enhance very dynamic performances.

Remixing a song is a skill that requires a lot of musical and technical know-how. Two of the most important elements to consider when beginning to create a remix are determining the original tempo of the song you’re remixing and lining up the vocal stem track to the beat.

Apple’s Logic software provides a handy plug-in called the BPM counter that helps to determine the tempo of a piece of music. Check out how to use it:

Often, remixers receive vocal stem tracks that don’t clearly align with the tempo grid when they’re imported into a project. That is, it’s unclear from the raw stem file where the downbeat is in comparison to the vocal performance. Check out how to align a vocal track with the tempo grid of a project:

In Remixing a Song in Logic, renowned remixer and author Josh Harris takes us through all of the remixing steps as he literally remixes a song in front of our eyes and ears. He covers all facets of the remixing process—aligning the vocals, working with loops, programming bass and synth parts, adjusting the remix arrangement—all the way to mixing and mastering the final version.

Check out Remixing a Song in Logicin the Online Training Library®, and look out for new training on the leading digital audio workstations coming soon.

Interested in more?
• All Logic courses in the Online Training Library®
• All audio courses in the Online Training Library®

Ever wanted to know how music gets edited into TV shows and movies? In Music Editing for TV and Film in Pro Tools, Skye Lewin shows you how putting music under picture is both an art and a science.

In this course, Skye will discuss how to edit and maneuver audio in Pro Tools, edit music to picture, create alternate audio edits, conform an edit to a picture if the scene has shifted, perform special effects, and use QuickTime to present edit revisions. He also discusses ways to utilize navigation, viewing, editing techniques, and key commands to speed up your editing process so you can focus more time on being creative.

The video used for demonstration in this course is a short film entitled Eli, starring David Anders (Alias, Heroes, 24, Once Upon A Time) and the music used is from composer Simon Hunter (CSI, Burn Notice, Iron Man trailer, Fast 5 trailer).

Pro Tools, the industry standard digital audio workstation, offers users a number of new features in its latest version, Pro Tools 10, including clip gain, real time fades, the ability to bounce your songs directly to your iTunes library, and the ability to share your music directly from Pro Tools with SoundCloud.

Avid has included some new plug-ins and made enhancements to its existing plug-ins, even adding a new plug-in format called AAX. There are also new importing and exporting features, audio engine and disk performance enhancements, extended system capabilities, added support for more file formats, and some interface and nomenclature changes.